How Long Does It Take to Buy A House?

If you have a particular move in date, pay close attention to this one. The settlement process (even for cash) is fairly involved and has a ton of moving parts. That necessarily means that it’s not a speedy affair.

That said, the timeline does vary quite a bit from one set of circumstances to the next. In very general terms, “most” settlements will take right around 45 days. The range of “the norm” will run from 30 to 60 days and is most directly tied to the particulars of the financial terms associated with the purchase. A lightning fast settlement would be 12 days. It’s theoretically possible to close faster, but this is the quickest I have ever heard a cash transaction going through. In this situation the terms of purchase contain the fewest conditions that are legally possible.

Each condition that is added to the agreement of sale lengthens the time it takes to close. The longest settlement timeline we have ever observed over the course of many hundreds of settlements was 317 days. This was for a theoretically “pre-approved short sale”. The parties to the sale went under contract in January and didn’t actually close until Mid November. Ironically this settlement was advertised as a ‘quick to close’ short sale because the bank had approved of the financial terms. What nobody knew was that the paperwork for the seller had been collected over an extended period of time and the various required documents kept on having the validity dates exceeded making the documents useless. This happened several times resulting in a cascading series of botched settlement dates. This isn’t normal…but it can happen.

Providing you aren’t involved in one of these special cases as a rule of thumb, if you want to move in at the end of September for example, you should be putting an offer in on your dream home around the middle 10 days of August.

Would you like to settle according to a specific timeline? If so, don’t guess. Once we know the specifics of your circumstances it’s very easy for us to reverse engineer the various milestones you have to reach in order to move in on or about a specific date. Want to know when you can expect to receive the keys to your next home? Give us a call. We’ll be happy to work it out.